Programming note: please join me later tonight at SteynOnline for the last of this season's Christmas Tales for Our Time.
~The illustration at right comes from Don Surber's column on my boffo demographic bestseller America Alone. It's cute, but it's not how I feel. Back in the fall of 2006, I was being called up constantly by bigshots anxious to have me swing by and brief them on the book's thesis - presidents, prime ministers and princes (three of whom have since become kings). They all listened carefully, nodded their heads in agreement, and then did ...nothing.
So the future outlined in my book has now come to pass. From Mr Surber's précis:
Mark Steyn predicted the world we live in 20 years ago with the publication of America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It....
Sharks smell blood, Muslims smell weakness...
Who would have thought?
Steyn. He realized that Europe was too feeble, too socialist and too suicidal to take on the new threat. 20 years ago, he wrote:
The continent has embraced a spiritual death long before the demographic one. In those seventeen European countries that have fallen into the "lowest-low fertility," where are the children? In a way, you're looking at them: the guy sipping espresso at a sidewalk café listening to his iPod, the eternal adolescent charges of the paternalistic state. The government makes the grown-up decisions and we spend our pocket money on our record collection...the long-term cost of welfare is the infantilization of the population. The populations of wealthy democratic societies expect to have total choice over their satellite TV package, yet think it perfectly normal to allow the state to make all the choices in respect of their health care. It's a curious inversion of citizenship to demand control over peripheral leisure activities but to contract out the big life-changing stuff to the government. And it's hard to come up with a wake-up call for a society as dedicated as latter-day Europe to the belief that life is about sleeping in.
Tell me 20 years later that this is not true. Europeans have forgotten how to make babies.
Visit Italy. See David while you can because the statuary goes once the caliphate arrives. The Sistine Chapel will become a mosque.
Westerners have invented new rules that defy logic, reason and reality even in America, where ignoring biology is called science. His take on Gitmo was so on target it was like taking a swing from Mar-a-Lago and hitting the golf cup on the moon:
Far from being tortured, the prisoners [at Guantanamo] are being handled literally with kid gloves (or simulated kid-effect gloves). The U.S. military hands each jihadist his complimentary copy of the Koran as delicately as white-gloved butlers bringing His Lordship the Times of London. It's not just unbecoming to buy in to Muslim psychoses; in the end, it's self-defeating. And our self-defeat is their surest shot at victory...Even a loser can win when he's up against a defeatist. A big chunk of Western Civilization, consciously or otherwise, has given the impression that it's dying to surrender to somebody, anybody. Reasonably enough, the jihadists figure: hey, why not us?
Talk about Club Fed.
And so it goes, on Bondi Beach and beyond.
~As I have said, we have at max a decade-and-a-half to prevent a thousand years of darkness - the long Eurabian night. In 1900 Europeans comprised 25 per cent of the world's population. Today they are nine percent. By century's end they will be five per cent - and entirely irrelevant. "White people" - which is to say the fellows who built the modern world - will be on their way to extinction. To pluck at random, Ukraine, from its catastrophically diminished numbers of today, is expected to lose a further sixty per cent of its population by 2100.
If you have vaguest of misgivings about such a whiteless world, it is necessary to have the widest bounds of public discourse even to mention such things. Yet oddly, even as more and more people recognise the existential question confronting them on the walk to the 'bus stop, the more the obvious venue for such conversations, the "mainstream" media, is ever more furiously consumed by trivia - who's going to be Lord Privy Seal next week and the like.
Longtime SteynOnliners will recall the special I did three-and-a-half years ago on victims of the vaccine - the first such anywhere in the world on a mainstream broadcast channel. I had strong views on which victims - those either crippled or bereaved by Pfizer and AstraZeneca - I wanted on the show. But, when one of my producers said a couple of other GB News presenters had expressed interest in coming on, I said, "Yeah, whatever", and left it to them.
In the end, Michelle Dewberry, Neil Oliver and Dan Wootton joined me that night. It is striking that three-quarters of us no longer appear on the channel. Dewbs is a wily survivor, and good luck to her, but that seventy-five per cent fatality rate tells you a lot about the necessity, for anyone wishing to make an enduring career in "mainstream" media, of staying within the bounds of approved trivia.
~Meanwhile, back in what passes for reality, here we go again:
Covid boosters increase risk of virus that harms brain health, new study finds
And it's quite a sample size:
The discovery comes from researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who analyzed electronic health records from more than two million people aged 12 and older who had received at least one Covid vaccine.
They found that after the third jabba-jabba - the first so-called "booster" - your chances of contracting shingles increase by a mere twenty-one per cent. And what's that got to do with "brain health"?
Separate research found that adults aged 50 and over who were hospitalized with shingles were seven times more likely to develop dementia.
Among men of all ages, researchers found a significantly higher risk of shingles after receiving a vector-based vaccine, with a 38 percent increase.
Still, with all that "superflu" going around, don't fall for peer-reviewed conspiracy theories about boosters and dementia. If you want favourable press coverage from CNN's Jake Tapper, get your forty-seventh jabba-jabba today:
The point here is that, as the superflu hysteria in America and Europe reminds us, the ruling class regards the Covid years as a great success and the model for your future. But maybe people will resist before they develop the technology to boost you while you renew your Pornhub subscription.
~As you know, SteynOnline is one of those hopelessly old-fashioned mom'n'pop websites from the early days of the Internet before the Age of Platforms. We're like Bud's Five'n'Dime before it got swept away by the massive branch of the all-Chinese CrapULike they built on the edge of town where the mill used to be.
Still, some of these "platforms" are very committed to free speech. Like, er, Parler, is it? No, wait, Substack. On the other hand, Niall McCrae writes:
[Rod Dreher] had posted on a blasphemous art exhibition in Vienna, and included an image of Jesus in a loin cloth. He also made critical comments about Muslims. Readers were barred from access to his articles, unless they either scanned their face for an age assessment, or provided government-issued identity.
Substack does not tell writers what rule they have broken, simply stating that the content is 'age-related'. This could be sexually-explicit imagery, or it could be that very contemporary phenomenon of 'hate'. Dreher was potentially offending on both of these conditions.
And again:
Another subscriber told me that he was asked for his age before he could access my article 'Muscular Christianity: a New Crusade'... Well, he is just a nipper at 69, so he declined. Then I realised that not only were all readers blocked from commenting, but I too was barred from doing so!
At this point I'd quote Sir Edward Grey on the lamps going out all over Europe (and Australia). But I'm worried he might have been cancelled...
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a Christmas Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
